Student Media Company is shutting down due to lack of funds after its board voted to dissolve the company in January, board member David Sedman said. The company independently produces SMU Campus Weekly — The Daily Campus’ weekly print edition — the Rotunda yearbook and SMU’s fashion magazine, SMU Look.

Student journalists have raised concerns over The Daily Campus losing its editorial independence when the publication moves under university control.

“While we trust that what’s left of our newspaper will be in good hands in the journalism department, we don’t have the same faith in their bosses,” the paper’s editorial board wrote Wednesday.

Kylie Madry, editor in chief of The Daily Campus, said the future for an independent Daily Campus looks bleak. But she’s still holding out hope that last-minute donations could save the company from dissolving. She said she has been approached by alumni asking how to stop the company from closing.

“If somebody comes in and says, ‘Here’s x amount of dollars, I want to save Student Media,’ we want to be able to still open ourselves up to that,” she said.

The board’s vote would allow the company to stay open if there was a huge, last-minute donation, Sedman said.

The student publications have faced financial trouble since 2003, Sedman said, when once-mandatory student fees funding student media moved to an opt-in basis. Unsurprisingly, students didn’t opt into that fee, Sedman said.

Later, ad revenue dried up, Sedman said. He said the board looked at alternative ways to fund the paper and made many cuts over the years, but still came up empty.

“We knew that there was a downtrend, and without a major donation or student fees changing — without something like that, we were in trouble,” he said. “We were very interested in any innovations to keep it going longer. I think just about anybody looking at our books for the past ten years — I think everybody knew that it was not a sustainable operation past 2003.”

SMU alumna Jessica Huseman, now a reporter for ProPublica, said she doubts the board looked at all of its options before dissolving the company, which is a nonprofit. A former Daily Campus editor in chief, she said alumni were never asked to donate to student media ahead of the board’s plan to shut down the company.

“If we had been asked for help at any point, we would have given it,” Huseman said. “I would have done fundraising for them. So when the board says, we tried to do all these creative things, that’s [expletive]. They just didn’t.”

The company made a big fundraising effort for the university’s centennial in 2015, but it fell flat, Sedman said. After that, donor outreach fizzled out, he said. The company still accepts donations online.

Huseman said she found the idea that editorial independence at The Daily Campus could continue after the publication moves under university control “delusional.”

“It would be like if the U.S. government funded The Washington Post,” she said. “The Washington Post would not be able to write critically about the people who would pay its journalists.”

Huseman, who headed a New York City SMU alumni chapter, resigned Thursday after learning of the company’s plan to dissolve. She said she won’t be donating to the university anymore.

Sedman said the journalism department was considering establishing an independent board to govern the paper. He said he didn’t think the current generation of journalism faculty would create obstacles for the paper’s independence.

“With this current administration, I’m not at all worried about it. But that said, I don’t know what the next generation will do,” he said.

The last print edition of The Daily Campus will come out in May, he said. After the semester ends, the company will clear its building and close up shop. The fashion magazine will move under control of the journalism department. It’s unclear whether the Rotunda, SMU’s yearbook will continue publication.